7 March, 2013 9:15AM AEDT
In his new book, Toxic Oil, David Gillespie says, "There is no evidence that saturated fats cause heart disease, but (there is evidence) that when we replace animal fats in our diets with seed oils we significantly increase the amount of harmful omega 6 fats in our cell membranes and this inevitably leads down a pathway to cancer and heart disease." However, there is increasing concern being expressed by health professionals about the claims made in David Gillespie's book. 1233's Carol Duncan spoke with David Gillespie about his new book, and also David Driscoll, Dr Rosemary Stanton and Dr Darren Saunders to respond.
DAVID GILLESPIE: The oils that I'm talking about (in Toxic Oil) are things that appear on the label as 'vegetable oil' which is ironic because you can't get oil from a vegetable, what they are, mostly, is seed oils produced by industrial processes which didn't form part of the human diet prior to about 1920.
DAVID GILLESPIE: There's always been a bit of a problem with the statement that saturated fats cause heart disease and the bit of a problem is that there's never been any evidence of it. What there has been evidence of is that saturated fats raise cholesterol and that vegetable oils lower cholesterol but then the connection between that raising and lowering of cholesterol and heart disease has always been missing and still to this day there persists to be a complete lack of evidence in this regard.
CAROL DUNCAN: Then how come we've got millions of Australians being medicated for their cholesterol levels?
DAVID GILLESPIE: Because it makes a lot of money for drug companies, to be honest. One in three Australians over 50 being medicated for cholesterol levels and the drugs certainly lower cholesterol but there's no evidence they have any impact on heart disease outcomes. It's good business for drug companies but it's not very good for Australians. Worse than that, the drugs being used to do this are shutting down the very process that could protect them (people) against the oxidation damage which these seed oils, these man-made fats, are introducing into our system.
A seed oil is something like canola oil, sunflower, grapeseed or rice bran oil - these are the oils that I'm we should avoid and the reason we should avoid them is they're very high in a type of fat called omega 6 which was extremely rare in our diets prior to about 1920 and the reason that we're consuming vast quantities of these oils now is because they're cheap. It is very much cheaper to make an oil or a fat out of applying an industrial process to a waste products like seeds than it is to raising and slaughtering an animal to get its fat which is what we did as humans for millenia prior to about 1920.
DAVID GILLESPIE: The problem with these fats is that our bodies can't tell the difference. Our body sees a fat - it's a fat, it treats it exactly the same way as any other fat. What our body does with fat is it incorporates it into our cell membranes.
Every cell in our body is constructed from cell membranes which consist largely of saturated and mono-unsaturated fat in normal conditions, animal fats, we're animals, we make animal fat. When we start to replace those fats in our diets with fats that have been manufactured from seeds, we significantly increase the amount of these harmful omega 6 fats that get incorporated into our cell membranes.
Now the reason that's a problem is that these fats oxidise, they are very prone to oxidation and oxidation leads inevitably down a pathway to cancer and heart disease. That's not just me saying that, there's well established evidence that says that. If we incorporate something into every cell in our body which oxidises more easily then we are putting ourselves on an inevitable pathway to cancer and heart disease, which is why we are seeing both of those things reach epidemic proportions only since we've introduced these fats into our diet in significant quantities.
CAROL DUNCAN: There has been a lot of criticism on social media and a website www.davidgillespiesbigfatlies.com in response to the Big Fat Lies book claiming that you are not backing your claims up with the scientific research?
DAVID GILLESPIE: Well I've never seen any scientists say that. I've seen some sports physiologists say that and quite honestly it's a lot of what I'd call 'trolling' - people just saying things rather than backing it up with evidence. I back up everything I say with evidence. Every study I mention in my book is fully referenced. I do not expect anybody to take what I say at face value. I expect everybody to read past me and look at the evidence.
So, what are the fats that David Gillespie thinks we should be eating?
DAVID GILLESPIE: We should be consuming animal fats or fats that are high in mono-unsaturated fats like olive oil or fats high in saturated fats like coconut oil. There's a certain logical fallacy in ascribing modern diseases like cancer and heart disease, I say they're modern because they're really only present in epidemic proportions in the modern age - to ancient foods like animal fats and coconut oil.
The reality is that those diseases have only existed in epidemic proportions since we introduced significant quantities of omega 6 fat into our diet. What has happened over the last 100 years is that we have steadily substituted every source of animal fat in our food supply with these seed oils.
CAROL DUNCAN: But we're also living longer than we used to. How many people previously lived long enough to die of cancer?
DAVID GILLESPIE: We don't know but there is starting to be evidence emerging that people lived a lot longer than we thought they did. There's no denying that medical science helps us live longer and medical science has advanced in enormous leaps and bounds in the last hundred years and especially in the last 50 years. Heart disease death rates have halved in a time when heart disease incidence rates have doubled so just because we're getting better at fixing the problems doesn't mean we're getting better at preventing them.
CAROL DUNCAN: I reckon if I changed my family's diet over to butter my GP would have harsh words with me.
DAVID GILLESPIE: He may well do but your GP would be wrong.
Even looking at the research data on this, a fantastic re-analysis of the Sydney Heart Study which came out just three weeks ago which showed that when you break that study down - they had two groups of people, one on a normal animal fat diet eating butter, and a group consuming margarine and seed oils, they found a significant 60 - 70% higher mortality rate in the folks eating seed oils. That is completely the opposite of what we've been told for the last 30 to 40 years but this is data that's been there for 30 - 40 years it's just been comprehensively ignored.
People are looking around them and thinking, 'I've been following these instructions (from doctors) for 40 years and all of my friends have been following these instructions for 40 years and I see more and more of my friends succumbing younger and younger to diseases that this diet that I'm being told to consume is supposed to fix'. The reality is that over the last 40 years obesity rates have doubled or tripled and the rates of most chronic diseases are in the same category so if the diet that we're supposed to be consuming and that we've been told to consume for the last 30 to 40 years is the correct one then it's operating in a very perverse fashion indeed.
CAROL DUNCAN: It's difficult for most of us to believe that this is a great conspiracy theory between big pharma and the big food manufacturers.
DAVID GILLESPIE: It's not a conspiracy theory, it's nothing of the sort. It's just business. When there's a decision to be made about a food company's profit today versus your health in 30 years time, that's not a decision. The answer is obvious to the shareholders of that company.
CAROL DUNCAN: It is difficult for those of us who aren't scientists or health or medical professionals to truly understand scientific papers, to sort through competing information about what we should be eating and feeding to our children, or not, so when you hear that vegetable oil, seed oils, will lead you inevitably on a path towards cancer and heart disease that's pretty scary.
Our doctors have been telling us for years, 'knock off the saturated fats, leave the butter alone, light milk is probably a better option for lots of people', so how do you work it out?
Given that there is criticism by scientists and health professionals of some of the claims that David Gillespie makes in Toxic Oil, I asked three of them to join me to give their opinions in weighing up scientific evidence.
DAVID DRISCOLL has a masters degree in physiology and dietetics and is 'interested in science and the scientific process and evidence in general'. He is also a critic of some of David Gillespie's claims and he writes about this at www.davidgillespiesbigfatlies.com
DIETITIAN DR ROSEMARY STANTON has a science degree majoring in biochemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry and followed up with post-graduate qualifications in nutrition and dietetics.
DR DARREN SAUNDERS is Senior Research Officer, Group Leader, Cancer Research Program Senior Lecturer (conjoint), Faculty of Medicine, UNSW (Garvan Institute).
CAROL DUNCAN: David Driscoll, this is an area you're very passionate about, trying to tackle these claims.
DAVID DRISCOLL: Definitely, it's more about the misrepresentation of science and of the people who are experts in the area, the downplaying of their training and education, their understanding of the science and just passing it off to say, 'Well none of these people know what they're talking about, they're all corrupted, they're all being told lies or telling us lies for their own commercial benefit.'
GRAB FROM DAVID GILLESPIE INTERVIEW: "There's always been a bit of a problem with the statement that saturated fats cause heart disease and the bit of a problem is that there's never been any evidence of it. What there has been evidence of is that saturated fats raise cholesterol and that vegetable oils lower cholesterol but then the connection between that raising and lowering of cholesterol and heart disease has always been missing and still to this day there persists to be a complete lack of evidence in this regard.
CAROL DUNCAN: Then how come we've got millions of Australians being medicated for their cholesterol levels?
DAVID GILLESPIE: Because it makes a lot of money for drug companies, to be honest. One in three Australians over 50 being medicated for cholesterol levels and the drugs certainly lower cholesterol but there's no evidence they have any impact on heart disease outcomes."
RESPONSE FROM DAVID DRISCOLL: The way David likes to represent the science is everything is black and white. The reality is that science is really grey. Science will make claims like 'something will increase the chance of something else' or 'this is is correlated with something' or 'if you reduce this, this will happen', but David tends to make black and white statements, 'Fructose is poison', 'every mouthful of vegetable oil will make you closer to death', in the past he's said that 'type 2 diabetes is a disease which is entirely put down to over consumption of sugar', 'Australians don't eat animal fats anymore', it's just black and white/yes/no 100% convinced thing that should be the first red flag that it's just not based on science.
DR ROSEMARY STANTON: Some of the things that David Gillespie says have a grain of truth to them but he extrapolates things to a ridiculous extent. I've spent my life trying to get people to eat less sugar but I refuse to accept his idea that you must have absolutely no sugar and at first he was even against people having any fruit. Some of the anti-sugar people don't even want people to have peas and carrots because they contain natural sugars. This kind of extremism really gets to me.
When I look at his statements about vegetable oils he basically suffers from a bit of a lack of biochemistry so that he thinks we're all eating lots omega 6 polyunsaturated oils. He classes canola oil in with that but canola oil is actually a mono-unsaturated fat with a bit of omega 3 polyunsaturate in it, but he has this idea that the body treats all fats in the same way and totally ignores the effects of processing.
Now I've also spent my life telling people to stop eating processed junk. Part of that processed junk contains products that started out as seed oils but you can't actually make crisp biscuits and pastries using a seed oil because they go soggy and so what they do is they process those seed oils and it's the processing that is the problem more than the liquid oil that you started with because during the processing you either hydrogenate the fat which produces saturated fat which he thinks is good and is what you're getting in all these junk processed foods that contain what started out as seed oil, or you partially hydrogenate the fat and you get the really nasty trans-fats which I think we'd all agree are pretty horribly.
In talking about saturated fat being good, he's actually ignoring the fact that the foods that we're both demonising - he's demonising because they started out with seed oils but I'm demonising because the seed oils were processed to create saturated fat. It's all these sort of mixtures, and the extremism, that I'm against.
I personally don't eat margarine and I try to keep my sugar intake low but I can't believe that I need to wipe out every little bit of sugar or that if I happen to eat something that contains a little bit of margarine that I'm about to die, that's absurd.
DR DARREN SAUNDERS: People respond to simple language, they respond to simple claims and that's very understandable but biochemistry is not simple unfortunately. This field of oxidative damage and DNA damage and mutation is something I've spent years working on. Unlike what Rosemary said there are very few grains of truth in what David (Gillespie) was just saying there. I'll stick to the evidence. The first thing I did when I heard this claim was I went to the medical journals, I went to all the studies that have been published. The overwhelming balance of evidence in this suggests that there is absolutely no link between consumption of polyunsaturated or omega 6 fats and cancer. In fact, there's one study that showed a very slight difference that wasn't statistically significant, it was a minor effect no better than random chance that there was a difference in people eating this or a normal diet. In fact there was just a huge study that came out from the National Cancer Institute in the US that showed that eating animal fats significantly increases your chances of getting cancer; pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, rectal cancer. The biochemical link that we were hearing there about oxidative stress and damage to DNA, that's fine, there are mechanisms where oxidative damage causes mutations to the DNA that can lead to cancer. That link doesn't carry to eating polyunsaturated fats. What David (Gillespie) is not telling us there is that there is occasionally a protective effect of incorporating these fats into your diet because what you get along with them are vitamins and other compounds that act as anti-oxidants and actually soak up that oxidative capacity.
CAROL DUNCAN: For the average person, trying to understand a scientific research paper can be incredibly difficult and potentially misleading.DAVID DRISCOLL: That's part of what David Gillespie does is just cherry picking - taking little bits of quotes out of studies and in many cases misrepresenting the entire findings of the study.
One of the three bits of research he's been quoting in the last week is the 'Veterans Trial' and it actually says that the change in cardiovascular disease was significant and was improved with polyunsaturated fats which David (Gillespie) claimed the opposite, and the change in cancer actually wasn't significant. It was close to significant but it wasn't.
The author then later goes on to say that the people with the lowest intake of polyunsaturated fats, 10 of the 31 that had cancer were in the lowest percentile of adherence to the diet so if you read the paper and understand it it's the exact opposite to what David says and this is something that comes up time and time again.
A lot of the papers are hard to understand and for most people they're not freely available, you've got to pay to get access or go to a library and read them so when David makes his claims of 'please go out and check' it doesn't happen because it's so hard for the average person to do and they just have to take his word for it.
At the start of Toxic Oil David (Gillespie) says 'science is based on people making hypotheses about how things might work and collecting evidence that will prove them right or wrong'. It's not about collecting evidence that proves you right or wrong, it's about having a hypothesis, testing it, weighing it against the rest of the information and then presenting it to people to critique.
I was actually around when that study that David Gillespie is quoting was done. I knew the people involved and I even helped write up some of the papers. In that particular study, it was 438 men I think, all over 50, all smokers, they'd already had a heart attack. And yes, they were asked to have a very high intake of polyunsaturated fat in the form of oils and margarine. It was about three times what the average person in Australia manages to eat now. The margarine was a problem in those days, it contained some very nasty trans-fats.
I think there is justification in criticising that people were encouraged to eat that margarine at that time without knowing all of the things about it, we really didn't know much about trans-fats in those days, the early 1970s. But even looking at that there were 35 deaths in one group and 28 in the other, it's really not a large number and these were people who had already had a heart attack and were smokers so you can hardly translate that to the entire population.
I think what it does illustrate though is that we look at food, and having just spent the last four years working on the dietary guidelines for the National Medical and Health Research Council, we brought down our new guidelines in terms of food because when you go into the supermarket, you do not go in there thinking, 'I'll get some polyunsaturated fat', you don't go in there thinking, 'where are the carbs', you actually go in looking for foods and we need to look at foods and we need to look at the way the foods have been produced and processed and everything else about them.
If you're looking for a spread I'd suggest you don't use too much of any kind of spread, I'd suggest you go into the fruit department and get some avocado. What David (Gillespie) has ignored is that foods, even the fats, are mixtures. If you go and buy some nuts, the nuts will contain a mixture of unsaturated fats which may be mono-unsaturated or poly-unsaturated and there'll be a little bit of saturated fat there, too.
Foods are actually mixtures. As well as that if you're going to buy extra virgin olive oil you've got about 35 other components there, many of which are quite protective, so we need to look at the actual food. I think the closer you can get to a whole food, probably the better. I'd rather have foods with minimal processing.
DR ROSEMARY STANTON: We've got to look at the total content of a food and we need to look in terms of food rather than this demonisation of particular things. If something is bad in a large amount, it doesn't mean it's bad in a small amount.
It really is the dose that makes the poison and his extremism of thinking that anything that contains an omega 6 fat really is a problem - I think he's got a point if you start looking at having a balanced intake between omega 6 and omega 3 fats, this is something that we nutritionists try and work out and that's why in our dietary guidelines we say to people, 'try and have some fish, try and have some nuts, more legumes and don't have too much red meat and don't have too much of various other things', so we translate that into food and people can actually go to the NHMRC/Department of Health website www.eatforhealth.gov.au and get lots of information.
This is from people who have looked at all of the evidence. We went through more than 55,000 pieces of evidence for those guidelines, we didn't just pick out a piece of information here and there.
Further reading:
The Heart Foundation response to claims in David Gillespie's book, Toxic Oil.
Industry response from the Australian Oilseeds Federation.
When I look at his statements about vegetable oils he basically suffers from a bit of a lack of biochemistry so that he thinks we're all eating lots omega 6 polyunsaturated oils. He classes canola oil in with that but canola oil is actually a mono-unsaturated fat with a bit of omega 3 polyunsaturate in it, but he has this idea that the body treats all fats in the same way and totally ignores the effects of processing.
Now I've also spent my life telling people to stop eating processed junk. Part of that processed junk contains products that started out as seed oils but you can't actually make crisp biscuits and pastries using a seed oil because they go soggy and so what they do is they process those seed oils and it's the processing that is the problem more than the liquid oil that you started with because during the processing you either hydrogenate the fat which produces saturated fat which he thinks is good and is what you're getting in all these junk processed foods that contain what started out as seed oil, or you partially hydrogenate the fat and you get the really nasty trans-fats which I think we'd all agree are pretty horribly.
In talking about saturated fat being good, he's actually ignoring the fact that the foods that we're both demonising - he's demonising because they started out with seed oils but I'm demonising because the seed oils were processed to create saturated fat. It's all these sort of mixtures, and the extremism, that I'm against.
I personally don't eat margarine and I try to keep my sugar intake low but I can't believe that I need to wipe out every little bit of sugar or that if I happen to eat something that contains a little bit of margarine that I'm about to die, that's absurd.
GRAB FROM DAVID GILLESPIE INTERVIEW: The problem with these fats is that our bodies can't tell the difference. Our body sees a fat - it's a fat, it treats it exactly the same way as any other fat. What our body does with fat is it incorporates it into our cell membranes. Every cell in our body is constructed from cell membranes which consist largely of saturated and mono-unsaturated fat in normal conditions, animal fats, we're animals, we make animal fat. When we start to replace those fats in our diets with fats that have been manufactured from seeds, we significantly increase the amount of these harmful omega 6 fats that get incorporated into our cell membranes. Now the reason that's a problem is that these fats oxidise, they are very prone to oxidation and oxidation leads inevitably down a pathway to cancer and heart disease. That's not just me saying that, there's well established evidence that says that. If we incorporate something into every cell in our body which oxidises more easily then we are putting ourselves on an inevitable pathway to cancer and heart disease, which is why we are seeing both of those things reach epidemic proportions only since we've introduced these fats into our diet in significant quantities.CAROL DUNCAN: Most people simply want to make the best possible food choices for their families. Trying to wade through the health messages can be difficult but when told that we're putting our families at risk of cancer or heart disease we will usually listen. So what does the cancer researcher think?
DR DARREN SAUNDERS: People respond to simple language, they respond to simple claims and that's very understandable but biochemistry is not simple unfortunately. This field of oxidative damage and DNA damage and mutation is something I've spent years working on. Unlike what Rosemary said there are very few grains of truth in what David (Gillespie) was just saying there. I'll stick to the evidence. The first thing I did when I heard this claim was I went to the medical journals, I went to all the studies that have been published. The overwhelming balance of evidence in this suggests that there is absolutely no link between consumption of polyunsaturated or omega 6 fats and cancer. In fact, there's one study that showed a very slight difference that wasn't statistically significant, it was a minor effect no better than random chance that there was a difference in people eating this or a normal diet. In fact there was just a huge study that came out from the National Cancer Institute in the US that showed that eating animal fats significantly increases your chances of getting cancer; pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, rectal cancer. The biochemical link that we were hearing there about oxidative stress and damage to DNA, that's fine, there are mechanisms where oxidative damage causes mutations to the DNA that can lead to cancer. That link doesn't carry to eating polyunsaturated fats. What David (Gillespie) is not telling us there is that there is occasionally a protective effect of incorporating these fats into your diet because what you get along with them are vitamins and other compounds that act as anti-oxidants and actually soak up that oxidative capacity.
CAROL DUNCAN: For the average person, trying to understand a scientific research paper can be incredibly difficult and potentially misleading.DAVID DRISCOLL: That's part of what David Gillespie does is just cherry picking - taking little bits of quotes out of studies and in many cases misrepresenting the entire findings of the study.
One of the three bits of research he's been quoting in the last week is the 'Veterans Trial' and it actually says that the change in cardiovascular disease was significant and was improved with polyunsaturated fats which David (Gillespie) claimed the opposite, and the change in cancer actually wasn't significant. It was close to significant but it wasn't.
The author then later goes on to say that the people with the lowest intake of polyunsaturated fats, 10 of the 31 that had cancer were in the lowest percentile of adherence to the diet so if you read the paper and understand it it's the exact opposite to what David says and this is something that comes up time and time again.
A lot of the papers are hard to understand and for most people they're not freely available, you've got to pay to get access or go to a library and read them so when David makes his claims of 'please go out and check' it doesn't happen because it's so hard for the average person to do and they just have to take his word for it.
At the start of Toxic Oil David (Gillespie) says 'science is based on people making hypotheses about how things might work and collecting evidence that will prove them right or wrong'. It's not about collecting evidence that proves you right or wrong, it's about having a hypothesis, testing it, weighing it against the rest of the information and then presenting it to people to critique.
GRAB FROM DAVID GILLESPIE INTERVIEW, CAROL DUNCAN: I reckon if I changed my family's diet over to butter my GP would have harsh words with me. DAVID GILLESPIE: He may well do but your GP would be wrong. Even looking at the research data on this, a fantastic re-analysis of the Sydney Heart Study which came out just three weeks ago which showed that when you break that study down - they had two groups of people, one on a normal animal fat diet eating butter, and a group consuming margarine and seed oils, they found a significant 60 - 70% higher mortality rate in the folks eating seed oils. That is completely the opposite of what we've been told for the last 30 to 40 years but this is data that's been there for 30 - 40 years it's just been comprehensively ignored.DR ROSEMARY STANTON: I eat butter but I try to only eat a small amount, in fact I try to avoid yellow spreads most of the time. I don't think we need yellow spreads. But I like butter and so once a day I allow myself one piece of toast with some butter on it because I really enjoy it with some of my home made marmalade on top of that!
I was actually around when that study that David Gillespie is quoting was done. I knew the people involved and I even helped write up some of the papers. In that particular study, it was 438 men I think, all over 50, all smokers, they'd already had a heart attack. And yes, they were asked to have a very high intake of polyunsaturated fat in the form of oils and margarine. It was about three times what the average person in Australia manages to eat now. The margarine was a problem in those days, it contained some very nasty trans-fats.
I think there is justification in criticising that people were encouraged to eat that margarine at that time without knowing all of the things about it, we really didn't know much about trans-fats in those days, the early 1970s. But even looking at that there were 35 deaths in one group and 28 in the other, it's really not a large number and these were people who had already had a heart attack and were smokers so you can hardly translate that to the entire population.
I think what it does illustrate though is that we look at food, and having just spent the last four years working on the dietary guidelines for the National Medical and Health Research Council, we brought down our new guidelines in terms of food because when you go into the supermarket, you do not go in there thinking, 'I'll get some polyunsaturated fat', you don't go in there thinking, 'where are the carbs', you actually go in looking for foods and we need to look at foods and we need to look at the way the foods have been produced and processed and everything else about them.
If you're looking for a spread I'd suggest you don't use too much of any kind of spread, I'd suggest you go into the fruit department and get some avocado. What David (Gillespie) has ignored is that foods, even the fats, are mixtures. If you go and buy some nuts, the nuts will contain a mixture of unsaturated fats which may be mono-unsaturated or poly-unsaturated and there'll be a little bit of saturated fat there, too.
Foods are actually mixtures. As well as that if you're going to buy extra virgin olive oil you've got about 35 other components there, many of which are quite protective, so we need to look at the actual food. I think the closer you can get to a whole food, probably the better. I'd rather have foods with minimal processing.
DR ROSEMARY STANTON: We've got to look at the total content of a food and we need to look in terms of food rather than this demonisation of particular things. If something is bad in a large amount, it doesn't mean it's bad in a small amount.
It really is the dose that makes the poison and his extremism of thinking that anything that contains an omega 6 fat really is a problem - I think he's got a point if you start looking at having a balanced intake between omega 6 and omega 3 fats, this is something that we nutritionists try and work out and that's why in our dietary guidelines we say to people, 'try and have some fish, try and have some nuts, more legumes and don't have too much red meat and don't have too much of various other things', so we translate that into food and people can actually go to the NHMRC/Department of Health website www.eatforhealth.gov.au and get lots of information.
This is from people who have looked at all of the evidence. We went through more than 55,000 pieces of evidence for those guidelines, we didn't just pick out a piece of information here and there.
Further reading:
The Heart Foundation response to claims in David Gillespie's book, Toxic Oil.
Industry response from the Australian Oilseeds Federation.
